That sounds like an analog ideal, akin to only listening to vinyl and only buying food grown within a 20-mile radius of your home. But it's such an unrealistic ideal that even Manjoo couldn't stay away from Twitter during his two-month experiment.

Plenty of Reading Eagle subscribers only read the print edition. For many people, however, digital formats, particularly mobile, are how they consume their news.

An MIT study published this week in Science points to a disturbing trend that should make us rethink our dependence on social media for news. Researchers studied tweets from millions of people between 2006 and 2017 and found that false stories spread faster on Twitter than do true stories.

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"We found that falsehood diffused (spread) significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information," the study's authors wrote.

Fantastic.

It's all well and good to say, avoid getting duped. But if the MIT study is true, no amount of skepticism will keep the flood of misinformation off of Twitter. Falsehoods are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true statements.

The fault, dear reader, lies not in our stars but in ourselves. Human behavior drives the spread of false information. The study even examined the effect of automated bots on propagating hoaxes and found their effect was negligible.

Asking Twitter's millions of users not to fall for misinformation is unlikely to help. I don't have a large-scale solution, except to argue that we need a solution. False information affects how people vote, how lawmakers decide policy and how markets behave.

We have to find a way to combat news hoaxes, or we soon won't recognize the world we're living in - mainly because we won't know what in the world is true.

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I'll be talking about fake news at a free talk from 6:30-7:30 Monday night at the Wyomissing Public Library. To register, visit wyopublib.org or call 610-374-2385.